South African obesity hits US levels

South Africans have grown as fat as Americans, partly because they associate slimness with HIV/Aids, researchers said yesterday.

More than half of black women in South Africa are overweight or obese, as are a third of black men, an epidemic on a par with that in the US.

Diseases associated with obesity, such as diabetes, were as grave a problem as malnutrition and urgent steps were needed to avert a public health crisis, it was claimed.

The first international conference on obesity held in Africa heard that a reduction in physical exercise and the spread of western eating habits, including the consumption of junk food, compounded the problem.

Findings from the conference, which wound up last week in the South African resort of Sun City, will be presented to the World Health Organisation by December.

Organised by the London-based International Association for the Study of Obesity (Iaso), it was the first of a series of regional meetings in the run-up to a world obesity conference in 2007.

"In some parts of South Africa the density of fast-food outlets is almost as high as California," Tessa van der Merwe, who chairs the South African Society for the Study of Obesity, said yesterday.

Another cause was the widespread fear that losing too much weight too quickly might be misconstrued as the wasting away associated with HIV, the virus which leads to Aids, she said.

People should be educated that it was not necessary to become skinny: losing just 5% to 10% of their weight would drastically reduce the chance of developing diabetes, said Professor Van der Merwe.

Black, white and mixed-race people in South Africa had all followed the recent global trend in becoming heavier but the obesity epidemic among black people was not new.

In the 1970s public health officials noted numerous overweight black people but took little notice, partly because of apartheid and partly because fat black people suffered fewer heart attacks than their fat white counterparts, spawning a myth that they enjoyed a "benign obesity", she said.

In fact, overweight black people were more likely to develop hypertension, strokes and diabetes. Some estimates project a doubling of type 2 diabetes among Africans by 2025, piling new pressures on health systems already creaking from the strain of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.

"The economic burden from this will act as a brake on development, which depends on having a healthy and productive population," said Philip James, who chairs Iaso's international obesity taskforce.

Obesity respected no borders, Professor James added. In Morocco 40% of the population was overweight; in Kenya it was 12%.

Contributors to a BBC website devoted to the issue lamented that being fat in many parts of the continent was still associated with health, wealth and power.

"Most men stroke their fat bellies as a sign that they have money. The bigger the belly the better," said Progress Njomboro, from Zimbabwe.

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